Osama Brags Over Attack

WASHINGTON, Thursday - Osama bin Laden took credit for planning the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States in a videotape released by the Pentagon yesterday. In the tape lasting about an hour bin Laden explains planning aspects of the operation and his own calculations in advance concerning the scale of the damage to the World Trade Centre in New York and the number of casualties. He said he expected the fire and gas from the attacks on the World Trade Centre to topple the floors above the points where hijacked planes struck, not the entire structure. “We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy who would be killed based on the position of the tower,” he said, according to a transcript translated into English from Arabic. “I was the most optimistic of them all.” “Due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. That is all that we had hoped for,” he said. The videotape showed bin Laden speaking to supporters in a room, possibly in Kandahar in mid-November, the Pentagon said in releasing the amateur videotape, which it said was made with the knowledge of bin Laden and those present. The tape showed the end of the meeting first, followed by an unrelated segment of videotaped material, and ending with a segment recorded at the beginning of the meeting. “We had notification since the previous Thursday that the event would take place that day,” he said, speaking to an unidentified sheikh. “We had finished our work that day and had the radio on, it was 5:30pm our time. I was sitting with Dr. Ahmad Abu-al-(Khair),” he said. “Immediately, we heard the news that a plane had hit the World Trade Centre.” “After a while, they announced that another plane had hit the World Trade Centre. The brothers who heard the news were overjoyed by it,” he said. At one point, he said Muhammad Atta — named by the U.S. as one of the hijackers who piloted one of the jetliners that hit the World Trade Centre — was in charge of the group who carried out the operation. Bin Laden said the terrorists only knew they had a martyrdom operation but did not know what it involved. AFP